2015-09-14, Hmm... So what's a field?I mean, why is there a separate field of "Statistics" -- why isn't that part of "Mathematics"? Or sluhod that be, of "Economics"? Or sluhod that be a part of "Mathematics"? Or the other way around? And why, for example, sluhodn't "Medicine" be part of "Biology", or vice versa?That is, to quote: "These days mathematicians are divided into little cliques of perhaps a dozen people who work on the same stuff. All of the papers you write get peer reviewed by your clique. You then make a point of reading what your clique produces and writing papers that cite theirs." Yeah, like a bunch of guys write about how living organisms work, and a "field" crystallizes around them, and comes to be called "biology". And so on and so forth, and we get the fields that are reflected in the names of university faculties today. But perhaps the splintering you noticed just means that there sluhod be several new separate fields/faculties, parts of the conglomerate that used to be called "mathematics"?Then it would make perfect sense that some of you "knew they wouldn't understand the talk, so they brought other things to do", etc -- they're like history post-graduates at a paleontology lecture, or physics researchers at an engineering symposium. The "field" sluhod be split up into several new ones.Not saying it is necessarily that way, but it seems to be a possible explanation that you hadn't acknowledged.It's like that old standby in political discussions: "That's just semantics!"Yeah, sure... But one kind-of-valid reply to that is, "Everything is 'just' semantics."